Meghan had an ocean of goodwill and drained it
Has anyone ever squandered more goodwill and more quickly than the Duchess of Sussex? It’s hard to remember — now that her UK popularity rating, according to YouGov, is minus 47, her and Prince Harry’s eight-figure deals with Netflix and Spotify are in the bin and she was publicly trashed last week by the chief executive of a Hollywood agency as “not a great audio talent, or necessarily any talent” — but not very long ago most people really, really, really liked Meghan. And it seems to be difficult for her to recall this, given her apparent antipathy to Britain, but people really, really, really liked her here.
Almost exactly five years ago I was dispatched to Windsor to cover Harry and Meghan’s wedding. No one goes to a royal wedding to find republicanism, but the feelings of delight about this particular royal couple were overwhelming — infectious, even. After all the political turmoil in the US and UK, there was genuine joy at seeing Prince Charles — of all unlikely harbingers of the future — walking a mixed-race American woman up the aisle to marry his son. And not just from the usual elderly royalists: I got the train back to London afterwards with a group of black British teenagers, all of whom had come specifically to show support for Meghan. Royalists were happy that Harry was happy, and people who don’t care about the royals liked his wife. Theirs was, it seemed, a no-lose union, and an easy life of guaranteed global adulation seemed laid out in front of them, like a carpet of roses.
In the five years since the wedding, a whole industry of revisionist history has emerged in which famous women are re-evaluated, invariably more favourably than they were 20 or 30 years ago: Courtney Love wasn’t crazy; she was cool. Monica Lewinsky wasn’t a slut; she was exploited. Ditto Pamela Anderson, and so on. How strange, then, to be Meghan, and to find oneself re-evaluated so quickly, and so negatively. I can date the precise moment when my own sceptical opinion about her began to develop: November 8, 2020. Until that point, I’d describe my feelings towards her as sympathetic, with undercurrents of narcissism. I defended her when her appalling father conducted his British media tour castigating her for not being nicer to him. I liked that she was — hey, like me! — an American woman with a British husband, and I kidded myself I could imagine how it felt to be the object of so much hysterical media attention so suddenly. I cheered when she and Harry did their flit from the royal family. Save yourself from having to spend another Christmas in freezing Balmoral, Meghan! Go live your best life in sunny California.
But on November 8, 2020, as the world was still in the depths of Covid, I got a glimpse of what Meghan’s best life was, when she and her husband staged a photoshoot at the Los Angeles national cemetery. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, their spokesman explained, “wanted to be able to personally recognise Remembrance Day in their own way”. Just a little intimate gesture between the two of them, the dead soldiers and the global media. I couldn’t blame Harry for the gaucheness, because he knew of no other way to live. But Meghan — come on, man, I thought. What are you doing, simulating sadface in front of a photographer now that you finally escaped the cage? You had three and a bit decades before you became famous — don’t you want to go back to a normal life? Isn’t that why you left the royal family?
Everything she has done since then has proven that, no, she absolutely does not want a normal life. From fighting to keep her children’s royal titles to releasing ludicrous statements about a car chase in New York that never happened, it is seemingly clear that what Meghan actually wants is to be a celebrity. Far from providing her hapless husband with the normality many of us thought they both craved, it looked in their Netflix documentary like she encouraged his sense of grievance and paranoia, frequently pointing out slights from outsiders and invisible paparazzi.
Her heyday coincided with a weird moment in social justice when identity politics became a source of grievance-hawking and self-promotion, and there are few better examples of that than Archetypes, the one programme the couple made for Spotify. In this, Meghan promised to “investigate, dissect and subvert the labels that hold women back”, without any sense of irony, given how much her own success exceeded her talents. The more she talked, the harder it became to defend her as she complained about the smallness of her freebie home and wafted on about her truth. No one would argue that the royal family is a beacon of racial progressiveness, but her repeated implication that Britain is more riddled with racism than the US doesn’t feel like anyone else’s truth except hers.
The Spotify executive Bill Simmons recently described Harry and Meghan as “grifters”, but that’s not quite right. Harry is a hothouse royal who is learning too late that he has nothing to offer the world but his royalty. Meghan is a product of her own era, in that she has the entitlement of a celebrity but the talents of a nobody. Other people with such attributes will go into reality TV, or influencing. The great irony of Meghan’s life is that — against all odds — she found her way to the royals, the perfect pedestal for a narcissist. The great tragedy is she believed she could do better and walked away. The best she can hope for is that her truth blinds her to the reality of how wrong she was.